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Everyone Else Must Fail
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 By Karen Southwick Random House US$27.50, Cdn$41.95 hardcover |
review by Gordon Graham
As founder and chief executive of Oracle, Larry Ellison has masterminded the growth of one of the world's biggest software firms. With his Italian suits, jet planes and multimillion-dollar yacht, he cuts a dashing figure in an industry dominated by geeks. He is many things, writes Karen Southwick, but "nice" is not one of them: "By turns brilliant and intolerant, inspiring and chilling, energetic and disinterested, Ellison is one of the most intriguing, dominant and misguided leaders of a major 21st-century corporation." | ||
Her title is a motto attributed to Genghis Khan: "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail."
For Ellison, "everyone else" seems to include his hand-picked executives, whom he routinely pushes out just before their millions in stock options come in. It also includes his customers, whom he publicly accuses of causing their own problems by daring to customize his company's applications.
For 27 years, both Ellison and Oracle have consistently treated others as mere stepping-stones on the road to profit.
The effect, argues Southwick, is that Oracle would have been even bigger and stronger today if it hadn’t burned so many people along the way.
Now Oracle has little goodwill to draw on. Competitors IBM and Microsoft are eating into its customer base. And Ellison is pushing 60 with no successor in sight. What comes next is anybody's guess, but hollow empires have a habit of collapsing.
This review appeared in the Report on Business magazine of the Globe and Mail in December, 2003.
How to contact us
February 16, 2004
Review © 2003 by
Gordon Graham
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